Marine Corps Tank Battles in Vietnam

PROLOGUE

Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry,

The subject of it is War, and the pity of War.

The Poetry is in the pity.

All a poet can do is warn.

Wilfred Owen, preface to Poems

At 0330 hours any Marine at the Gio Linh Combat Base could see and hear for himself what was going on at the new base ten kilometers to the southwest, but there was nothing you could do to help. The distant rumble that rose and fell in waves and the flickering lights meant that men from both sides were dying at the place the Vietnamese called The Hill Of Angels.

No matter what you might think of the politics that motivated the average Mister Nguyen of the North Vietnamese Army, you could seldom fault his courage or combat skills. Fifteen minutes earlier it had been a quiet night like many others, but hundreds of NVA infantry and sappers had slipped quietly up to the base of the hill, skillfully evading roving patrols and small listening posts that ringed the hill but also absorbed most of its manpower.

A torrent of artillery fire drowned out the blasts of satchel charges hurled by elite sappers advancing through their own artillery fire, and many positions fell before the Marines could react. Gunnery Sergeant Barnett Person’s three tanks were a major part of the force defending the north slope of the hill, but minutes into the attack two were already useless hulks. Their crewmen were dead or wounded, or if they were a bit luckier, fighting for their lives in the maelstrom outside. For now, Person and his tank would have to fight it out where he sat. An infantry officer had sited Person’s tank just forward of his Command Post, where he could more easily control the tank’s firepower. But that decision meant that Person could not back his tank out of the shallow pit where it sat. The decision had sacrificed the mobility that was an important part of the tank’s shock power in combat, and more important, gave it some small chance to evade the RPG rockets that arced through the night like footballs trailing showers of sparks.

All around the tank the situation was already desperate. Tongues of orange fire from NVA flamethrowers flashed amid the whiter light of flares and explosions as the enemy moved down the thinly held trench lines. Teenaged Marines and NVA infantry fought with grenades, guns, bayonets, and knives in the dark bowels of bunkers.

In the confusion no one detected the NVA sappers who clambered onto the engine deck behind the turret of Person’s tank, and jammed a satchel charge under the gypsy rack, the pipe and steel mesh bin that held personal gear and anything else when the tank was on the move. The blast bounced the heavy tank on its suspension, and threw up all the dirt that accumulates inside the crew space, but the tank and its crew still lived. The gunner traversed the turret, but it ground to a stop, jammed by the twisted gypsy rack. An attempt to traverse the other way led to the same result; the tank would have to see this fight out with only limited turret traverse.

In the flickering light Person caught sight of the sapper team, which had retreated to a position in front of the tank and crouched on the ground, apparently preparing more satchel charges. Despite what Hollywood writers and historians tell us, combat seldom produces inspiring quotes. Person reacted with a standard fire command instilled by long habit: Gunner! Canister! Enemy on ground!

The second word gave the loader a critical fraction of a second head start to grab a heavy, square-nosed M338 shell, flip it over, jam it into the moving breech of the ninety-millimeter gun, snatch his hand out of the way as the breech block snapped shut, and shout Up at the top of his lungs. Almost instantly the gunner shouted On the way! and pressed his electrical trigger.

Thousands of small steel balls spewed out of the tank gun at supersonic velocities and shredded the six enemies beyond all recognition as human beings. But there was no time to think of that as Person searched for another threat to his survival. It was three hours until dawn, and countless enemies roamed the ground on all sides. May 8, 1967 would be a very long night at Con Thien.

* * *

With the possible exception of the brief and relatively cost-free war against Iraq in 1991, none of our wars have ever been one of the popular wars of our national mythology. Tory loyalists made up a significant portion of the population in the War of Independence. Internal economic divisions drove the New England states to the brink of secession in the War of 1812. In our historical blindness, we forget the war-weariness that gripped the nation in the final year of The Good War of 1941–1945, when both money and young lives to sacrifice were in increasingly short supply.

The veterans of Vietnam were not only victims of the misconceptions of the true place of war in our society, but of a unique confluence of social changes in American society. The Vietnam War was in many regards the most socially divisive in our national history, in some ways more so than the Civil War. Southerners used to call that conflict The War Between the States, which is perhaps a more descriptive term; it was on the whole a conflict between regions. The Vietnam War came to divide generation from generation, parent from child, and spouse from spouse in American society. Why?

When the war began, Americans were fearful of a monolithic Communism bent on conquering the world. Vietnam was depicted as the critical first in an inevitable series of small conflicts. The popular model was the domino theory. If we allowed Vietnam to fall, then Thailand would fall, then the Philippines, until at last, as the propaganda saying went, we would fight the Communists on the beaches of California. Only during the course of the conflict did we come to realize the schisms within the Communist world. Indeed the dominoes would not fall, because Communism held little appeal for the people of Thailand or the Philippines. The successes of the Communists in Vietnam were in fact the result of their cynical manipulation of powerful Vietnamese nationalism. Americans came to suspect that they had been sold a war under false pretenses. The traditional unpopularity of war to Americans was aggravated by the revelation.

America was also experiencing several independent internal upheavals. By its very nature, American society has long been accepting of social mavericks. Our national heroes are the mountain man Jim Bridger, the outlaw Jesse James, and Johnny Appleseed, not lawyers, accountants, and shopkeepers. The counter-cultural hippie movement was both a massive example of this national tendency and a reaction to the atypical (and often legally enforced) conformity that had marked American society in the 1950s and early 1960s. It was a revolt of privileged youth against the comfortable conformity of a generation that had survived the Depression, won a global war, and thought things were just fine, thanks.

Unfortunately the counter-culture brought with it destructive elements. Use of illegal drugs was widespread, and included not only old foes like heroin, but LSD (which ironically grew out of government experiments), the first designer drug. Marijuana gained new acceptance as an expression of the counter-culture. (Most young Marines undoubtedly approved of the concurrent sexual revolution).

On the whole the hippie movement was non-violent, but there was of course a complete spectrum of unsavory human behavior. Radical factions like the Weathermen turned to extreme violence in an effort to blindly overthrow the government, with no real vision of its replacement. The non-violent Civil Rights movement similarly spun off various radical wings, extending to outright criminal groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army.

As the Vietnam War dragged on and became increasingly unpopular, the more radical elements took their fury out on the returning troops. Communist sympathizers were of course glad to exploit the frustration and incite trouble, and many in the anti-war movement aped Communist propaganda without clearly considering the consequences. For their part, conservative elements in both society and government over-reacted with paranoia, exemplified by Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, and sometimes with deadly violence against its own citizens, as at Kent State University. Of course all this was dragged into the normally coherent military by the draft, and troops going to and from Vietnam had to cope with a brutally fractured society that sometimes vented its resentments on the returning veterans. More typically, society just ignored them out of either embarrassment or apathy.

Vietnam veterans were also victims of a sort of benign national lie. An entire generation had been raised on images of glorious parades and wild celebrations that greeted returning victors. In reality most returning veterans of past conflicts had never met with such receptions. The much-photographed celebrations that marked VE and VJ Days were spontaneous, and mainly benefited young trainees who had not yet gone overseas. There were a few show parades in places like New York, but by the time most veterans returned, months or even years later, society was back on a peacetime footing. The war was over. Returning veterans were supposed to hitch up their britches, don their gray flannel suits, and succeed in the post-war boom if they could.

By the end of World War II the government had come a long way toward providing care for the physically maimed, but in the 1950s there was no such thing as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. If you were among those mentally or emotionally damaged by war beyond coping, you were a drunk, an addict, or crazy. It was a problem for you and your family to deal with. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was still not a recognized problem at the end of the Vietnam War.

Over a period of years the men—and women—who served in the Vietnam War slipped back into a society that at best ignored them and at worst scorned them, unable to tell their stories of achievements in a lost and controversial war.

In the end veterans simply turned to each other, trying to look out for one another after the war as they had done in it. For all too many other Americans, acceptance of what had happened to them would be a long time in coming. True understanding could never, ever come for those who were not there. Acceptance would have to do.

CHAPTER 1

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TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF WAR

We have a secret weapon…. It is called Nationalism.

Ho Chi Minh

We badly underestimated our enemy.

With the arrogance of citizens of a young and vigorous nation, Americans tend to pay little attention to the long and often complex histories of other lands. What we ignored about Vietnam was that it was assembled from many disparate kingdoms over two thousand years of unrelenting and savage warfare, and possessed a long and proud history of resistance to occupiers from both neighboring and distant lands. Like so many peoples, the Vietnamese squabbled amongst themselves – to deadly effect—but their most ruthless struggles were against the many foreign troops that had marched over the unhappy land for centuries before America was even dreamt of.

The exact ethnic origins of the Vietnamese are lost in history, but they are a people who moved south out of China’s Yangtze Basin to displace the indigenous tribesmen whom the French and later the Americans would one day call montagnards.¹ Although careful to distinguish themselves from the Chinese, the Vietnamese built a culture along Confucian Chinese lines, complete with a Mandarin intellectual class. With an economy based on wet rice agriculture, the Vietnamese largely left the mountains to the hill tribes.

In 208 BC the renegade Chinese warlord Trieu Da established his kingdom in Canton. From there he governed a small empire that included northern Vietnam and southern China. In 111 BC, forces of the Chinese Emperor Wu Ti overran the kingdom; it was the beginning of a thousand years under the Chinese yoke. Chinese colonists and indigenous Vietnamese staged numerous revolts, with varying degrees of success. Several prominent revolutionary leaders were women, and women held higher status in Vietnamese culture than would have been conceivable in China, or in Europe for that matter. One revolt, led by two sisters, successfully evicted the Chinese, who returned two years later to crush the short-lived independent state.

In the south the Hindu kingdoms of Funan and Champa ruled over what is now the Mekong Delta and most of southern and southeastern Vietnam, respectively. Funan fell to the Khmer (Cambodian) Empire in the 6th century AD. In the 10th century AD a series of bloody revolts against the tottering Tang Dynasty of China culminated in a spectacular naval victory by Ngo Quyen in 938 AD, and the establishment of an independent Vietnamese state. From 1009 until 1225 AD the Ly Dynasty ruled from a base near modern Hanoi. Sandwiched among the Chinese and Khmer Empires and the Kingdom of Champa, the Vietnamese were in a near constant state of war. Between 1057 and 1061 the Chinese again battered unsuccessfully at the Vietnamese borders. Under the Tran Dynasty in the thirty-year span between 1257 and 1287, General Tran Hung Dao decisively repulsed three major invasions by the Mongol armies of Kublai Khan.

In 1400 a renegade general, Ho Quy Li, usurped the throne and in the ensuing struggle to retain his position invited the hated Chinese back into Vietnam. The Chinese Ming Dynasty imposed a brutal occupation marked by serfdom and an attempt to destroy the Vietnamese culture. From 1418 until 1426 Vietnamese rebels fought a series of savage battles against the Chinese, culminating in a decisive Chinese defeat near modern Hanoi at the hands of Le Loi, one of the towering figures of Vietnamese history. Le Loi instituted many reforms, and his heir, Le Thanh Tong, led Vietnam to its era of greatest power.

Under the lengthy Le Dynasty the real powers were rival clans, the Trinh and the Mac (eventually destroyed by the Trinh) in the north and the Nguyen in the south. For nearly a hundred years in the 14th and 15th centuries the Nguyen waged a prolonged and brutal war against Champa. In 1471 the Vietnamese captured the Champa capital and slaughtered its inhabitants.

THE COLONIAL ERA

In 1516 Portuguese traders appeared, followed by the Spanish and the French. Through trade and the introduction of modern technologies and Christianity, eventually to be followed by colonial rule, the French exerted a lasting impact on the region.

Between 1700 and 1760 the Nguyen at last wrested control of the Mekong Delta from the Khmer Empire, and the modern Vietnamese nation took shape.

During the long struggle between the Trinh and Nguyen, the two Tay Son brothers revolted against the moribund Le Dynasty and seized Hanoi in 1786. They were immediately confronted by another Chinese invasion, which they repulsed in 1788.

Soon Vietnam began to feel the influence of rivalries on the other side of the globe. The French, driven out of their richest colonies in the Americas, became the dominant European economic and social influence in Indochina. Oddly enough, the French government had little interest in the Southeast Asian backwater. Instead, the Roman Catholic Bishop in the small city of Saigon, Pigneau de Behaine, raised a force of European mercenaries who helped the usurper Nguyen Anh seize control of the Delta and Saigon in 1788 while the Tay Sons were distracted by events in the north. With French assistance Anh captured the major economic center, Hanoi, in 1802 and from his new imperial capital at Hue became Emperor Gia Long, ruling over all of Vietnam.

Gia Long’s heirs were rightly suspicious of French influence and the rising influence of the Roman Catholic faith. This suspicion was manifested through the persecution of Christian converts. The French bombarded the port of Danang in 1847 in retaliation, but otherwise the situation continued at a low boil.

The accession of Napoleon III, with his global imperialistic ambitions, affected both Southeast Asia and far away Mexico. In 1857 the revitalized French demanded trade concessions in Vietnam. When rebuffed they used the pretext of protecting native Catholics against persecution (which they had tolerated since about 1820) to invade. Danang fell to the French in September 1858, and Saigon the following February. Despite extensive Spanish aid, the French—crippled by the failure of the Christian Vietnamese to support their liberators—soon became bogged down, defeated by terrain unsuited to European armies, the climate, and tropical diseases. After a protracted campaign, in April 1863 the Vietnamese ruler Tu Duc ceded control of the major seaports of Saigon and Haiphong to the French.

Unfortunately for Tu Duc he soon enough repeated the mistake of Ho Quy Li, soliciting French aid in suppressing an 1867 revolt among his own citizens. The cost was the dismemberment of Vietnam. The French gained outright control of southern Vietnam, which they renamed Cochin China. Stung by their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and taking advantage of Tu Duc’s death with no heir, the French once more moved against Vietnam. In August 1883 they bombarded the Imperial City at Hue, and threatened the big commercial center at Hanoi. The terrified and vacillating court advisors succumbed to French threats. The sack of Hue and treaty of 25 August 1885 completed the dismemberment of Vietnam and established the Protectorates of Tonkin (northern Vietnam) and Annan (central Vietnam). In 1887 the French created the illusion of legitimacy with the Indochinese Union, made up of the three bits of Vietnam, the Cambodian Protectorate (which they had conquered in 1863), and eventually Laos (ceded by Thailand in 1893). Though the Vietnamese retained their Emperor, he was ruler in name only.

While they never formalized the barbarities of some other European colonial administrations, the French still proved cruel masters. The motivation was for quick financial profit from a land poor in any of the mineral or agricultural resources coveted by the European powers. The French exploited the country by proxy, ruling through a tiny minority of trusted indigenous Roman Catholic administrators and landlords. The landlords in turn used their positions and manipulated the repressive system of laws, burdensome taxes, and trade monopolies on virtually every product to seize ever-increasing tracts of agricultural land and to exploit the peasants as sharecroppers and indentured workers. Soon the French, and a few thousand fabulously wealthy Vietnamese collaborators, controlled the entire wealth of the nation. It was a situation ripe for small resistance movements, which were brutally suppressed by the French.

THE COMMUNIST RESISTANCE

In 1926 an obscure and self-educated man of Mandarin origins living in China formed the Revolutionary League of the Youth of Vietnam, or Thanh Nien. Born in the north of Vietnam as Nguyen Sinh Cung, as a boy he witnessed the bloody aftermath of several revolts against French rule. He ran away to the south, shipped out as a merchant seaman (calling himself Van Ba) and visited numerous ports before fetching up in New York City as a laborer. Moving on to London as a pastry chef named Nguyen Tat Thanh, he eventually joined the large Vietnamese expatriate community in Paris, under the new name Nguyen Ai Quoc.

Six years in Paris converted him from an idealistic nationalist to a socialist, and he moved on to Moscow (as Linh), where he briefly associated with the likes of Trotsky and Stalin as they struggled for the dead Lenin’s crown. Moving on to China and adopting the name Thanh Nien, he fled the massacre when Chiang Kai-shek turned on his Communist allies. He moved from Moscow to France to Siam (Thailand) to Hong Kong, where he helped found the Vietnamese Communist party. He spent another dozen years wandering the globe under uncounted assumed names.

Following the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940, Japan seized the opportunity to informally incorporate Vietnam into their sham Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. Faced with a considerable demand for troops, the Japanese allowed Vichy France to rule by proxy, along with the collaborationist figurehead Emperor Bao Dai.

In 1941 the itinerant revolutionary slipped across the border from China, returning to his beloved homeland after thirty years. In a cave he met with confidants such as Pham Van Dong and history professor Vo Nguyen Giap to form the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh (Vietnam Independence League), or Viet Minh. The wanderer was ambitious and a shrewd judge of character. His years on the run had hardened him into a ruthless and pragmatic man who could skillfully utilize the talents of others for his own ends, or destroy his opponents with equal ease. Assuming yet another name and persona, Ho Chi Minh (Bringer of Light), the revolutionary had at last found his mission in life.

By 1942 the Viet Minh armed forces under Vo Nguyen Giap were, with the aid of the Chinese (both Nationalist and Communist factions), British, and Americans, conducting an armed resistance to the Japanese occupation. In March 1945 the Japanese launched a takeover worthy of a Shakespeare play, inviting French military officers to dine with them. They seized the officers, and killed or captured the leaderless troops. These events prompted increased aid to the resistance through the Deer Mission, run by the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

As the Japanese Empire collapsed, on 2 September 1945 Ho Chi Minh took the opportunity to proclaim the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in the north. The puppet Emperor Bao Dai abdicated to become a senior advisor, and both the northern factions and the Communist-dominated Provisional Executive Committee of South Vietnam (PECSVN) sought Allied recognition through moderation. Instead the great powers, meeting at Potsdam, Germany, divvied up the nation. North of the 16th Parallel the Nationalist Chinese occupiers more or less ignored Ho’s machinations, and his presumptive government operated openly. In the south the British were far more repressive. Fearful of the effects of Asian nationalism on their own tottering Empire in India, Major General Douglas Gracey used his 20th Indian Division, liberated French prisoners, and Japanese Army units under British leadership to ruthlessly suppress the PECSVN and impose harsh conditions on the populace.

On 23 September a peculiar alliance of Vichy and Gaullist French forces stormed the Viet Minh party headquarters. As the French and Vietnamese jockeyed for position, Ho admitted non-Communists to his DRV government, and in November dissolved the Indochinese Communist Party. In March 1946 the Chinese and French reached an agreement for Chinese withdrawal. With both sides still weak, Ho agreed to let 25,000 French and French-led native troops garrison the country. The French in turn agreed to recognize the DRV as an independent state within the French Union, and withdraw their forces by 1952. Other nationalist forces denounced the agreement, prompting the French and Viet Minh to combine forces to destroy them.

Now confident in their power, the French immediately reneged on the deal. In June 1946 they declared Cochin China autonomous, and granted the powers promised to the DRV to the French-controlled Indochina Federation. By mid-October the French felt confident enough to reassert control in the north, seizing Haiphong. A revolt on 19–20 November collapsed but at considerable cost to the French, and on 23 November the French bombarded the city’s native quarter, killing over 6,000 civilians. Giap and his military forces slipped away into the interior to pursue a guerrilla strategy. Bao Dai briefly fled the country until the French reinstalled him as a puppet.

Bao Dai and the French were also engaged in other uneasy alliances in the south. The Cao Dai were a local religious sect who practiced a mixed Asian and Christian theology, but more importantly had what amounted to a 30,000-man private army. The schismatic Hao Hao Buddhist sect in the Delta commanded another 15,000-man army. The most influential was the Binh Xuyen organized crime cartel that controlled all the vices of the ethnic Chinese Cholon District of Saigon; their 2,500 soldiers, augmented by bribed police and hired muscle effectively kept the Viet Minh out of Saigon proper.

The French continued to dally, waiting for American aid, making no effort to pacify the countryside—the source of the Viet Minh’s strength - through meaningful reform, and hamstrung by their constitutional ban on using French conscripts outside Europe. The Viet Minh grew in power after the fall of China to Mao Tse Tung’s Communists.

THE WAR AGAINST FRANCE

In September and October 1950 the Viet Minh captured two large border forts along the rugged ridges that form the border with China, and decimated the French relief columns. Strategically more important than the 6,000 French casualties and loss of materiel was that the actions secured an overland supply route from China. Overconfidence now led Giap to face the French in conventional battles for control of the populous Red River valley west of Hanoi, and between January and June 1951 the French, under their new commander, General Jean de Lattre, inflicted three major defeats on the Viet Minh. The road bound French were unable to pursue and exploit their victories, so Viet Minh power remained relatively intact.

In October 1951 the French repulsed an attempt to seize another border fort, Ngiah Lo, and in November a French airborne assault secured the big Viet Minh staging area at Hoa Binh. Though a tactical victory, the French were unable to open a land route and the force was left stranded in the countryside. Following the death of de Lattre from cancer, General Raoul Salan oversaw a costly breakout from Hoa Binh.

Both sides licked their wounds through most of 1952, until in mid-October Giap at last captured Ngiah Lo, securing yet more of his logistical lifeline. In late October 30,000 French and Vietnamese troops drove west into the Red River valley from Hanoi, but the offensive floundered to a halt amid relentless ambushes and its own logistical shortcomings.

In May 1953 General Henri Navarre replaced Salan, but by now the French effort was failing from the unreliability of the native troops that made up most of their force. Despite American aid, the ruinous financial costs and the ever-increasing demands for troops made the war increasingly unpopular in France.

In late 1953 a French airborne attack secured the isolated village of Dien Bien Phu, in a valley near the Laotian border. The place itself had no strategic value, but Navarre saw it as a remote place for a land-air base. In his vision, he could supply the position by air while the Viet Minh would exhaust themselves in both the struggle to move troops into the region and futile assaults, giving the French increased bargaining power in peace negotiations in Geneva. Navarre underestimated his own logistical limitations, and particularly his requirements for artillery. But most of all he underestimated Giap. Through immense effort the Viet Minh dragged American artillery and munitions, captured in Korea and China, to the remote valley.

In March 1954 the Viet Minh commenced unrelenting bombardments and costly infantry assaults, nibbling away at the French fortress. The Americans continued to supply the French, but General Matthew Ridgway advised against direct intervention in the form of long-range B-29 strikes, much less the nuclear intervention desired by some. On 7 May 1954 Dien Bien Phu fell, eleven thousand French and Vietnamese troops entered a brutal captivity, and the French lost all bargaining position in the Geneva negotiations.

An International Control Commission (ICC) made up of delegates from Canada, Poland, and India was to oversee the partition of Vietnam, with the proviso that two years later open elections would decide issues of reunification and the form of a new government. Immediately Colonel Edward G. Lansdale (US Air Force and CIA) of the Saigon Military Mission began to persuade about 900,000 refugees—mostly Catholics—to flee the North, gutting the country of many of its educated citizens. This exodus would have serious consequences, as the wealthy refugee elite came to dominate the politics and economy of the otherwise Buddhist south. At the same time about 100,000 southerners went north, weakening the Communist infrastructure in the south.

By 9 October the last of the French troops had left Hanoi. Joe Sleger had fought with Able Company, 1st Tank Battalion as part of the Marine Brigade in the Pusan Perimeter, and in the battles for Inchon, Seoul, and the horrific Chosin Campaign in Korea. In February 1952 he was commissioned, in his words, as a senior second lieutenant.

I was stationed on board a ship at the time, and the contingent of ships that I was with went into the Bay of Tonkin. Eight Marine officers were put ashore in Haiphong, and we had eight enlisted men with us who could speak French. We made contact with the French bureau of operations for the Tonkin area. We assisted them with evacuating their own forces, their colonial forces, and the Foreign Legion troops from the port of Haiphong.

PARTITION AND CORRUPTION

The revolutionaries now faced the daunting task of actually running a country, complicated by the loss of so many skilled workers and administrators in the southward exodus. Botched land reform led to rebellion in late 1956, and thousands of peasants were killed or relocated. This bought the even more disorganized government in the south a brief respite.

Emperor Bao Dai, the nominal ruler in the south, found himself on the horns of a dilemma. He needed a capable premiere, but one who posed no political threat. His choice was a poor one. Ngo Dinh Diem was an honest and capable administrator who had served briefly in the cabinet in the 1930s, but refused to collaborate with the Japanese. He went into voluntary exile, in part in the US, where he made influential contacts. He at first refused to work with either Ho or Bao Dai as a puppet, though both wooed him. Bao Dai eventually granted Diem full control over both the civil and military arms of the new government in the south. Diem controlled the South Vietnam National Army (SVNA), an organization crafted by and in some ways still loyal to the French.

The industrious Lansdale soon persuaded Diem to consolidate power by eliminating the private armies, covertly providing arms and money for the struggle. Diem instead chose a more traditional technique, buying off the Cao Dai and Hao Hao with cabinet posts and millions of dollars in American aid money. The more affluent Binh Xuyen refused to be bought off, and in February 1955 Diem unleashed the SVNA, driving the Binh Xuyen into the Rung Sat. For the next two decades the Binh Xuyen survived in these swamps near Saigon, and the Rung Sat Special Zone remained a thorn in the side of the South Vietnamese and later the Americans. Diem skillfully convinced the Cao Dai to stand aside as he eliminated the Hao Hao; then he turned on the Cao Dai. The survivors of both organizations became welcomed members of the rump Viet Minh organization that remained in the south.

Even as the struggle against the sects was going on, Diem convened an illegal national assembly that called for the dismissal of Bao Dai. In an October 1955 referendum in which 133% of the population voted, Bao Dai was overthrown. Diem then turned his considerable energies to eliminating the last vestiges of French influence.

Neither Ho nor Diem had any intention of abiding by the election provisions of the peace accords, and simply failed to conduct the elections scheduled for July.

Taking a leaf from Ho’s book, Diem formed the Can Lao Kan Vi party to ensure that a shadow government loyal to his family retained control of all aspects of the administration. Land reform required the peasants to purchase their land from the government. Heavy taxation and usurious loans assured that most of the land ended up in the hands of Diem’s loyalists.

Unfortunately Diem failed to follow another of Uncle Ho’s calculated practices that had helped to calm unrest in the north. Ho emulated Mohandas Gandhi by donning peasant garb and adopting a simple lifestyle. Diem, who lacked Ho’s charisma, instead aped the French colonialists in dress and lifestyle, further distancing himself from his subjects. A November 1960 coup that demanded less family domination prompted Diem to negotiate reform, but while negotiating Diem surrounded the plotters, captured them, and dismissed the promised reforms.

With the finalization of his control over the north, Ho was now free to turn his attentions to the liberation of the south. In 1960 Ho announced the formation of the new National Front, eventually to become better known by the name bestowed by the South Vietnamese and Americans: the Viet Cong (VC).

Again the great power politics of the West began to play out in Indochina. The departure of the French set into motion a long and complex three-sided civil war in Laos, controversial at the time but today little remembered in America. Neither the US nor the Soviet Union wanted to fight over insignificant Laos, and by mid-1961 peace talks were under way in Geneva. At the last minute the main US ally in the country derailed the talks by massing troops along the northern border, and the North Vietnamese attacked. The end result was a Laos neutral in name only, with a continuing shadow war fought by the Communist Pathet Lao and the US-backed Meo tribesmen.

Facing relentless political attacks by the Republicans for the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, and the loss of Laos (which no one much wanted to fight for anyway), President Kennedy decided to draw a line in the sand in Vietnam.

By 1961 the situation in South Vietnam was grim. Still stubbornly resisting any sort of reform despite Washington’s pressure, Diem feared coups more than the Communists. Most units of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) were not under a central command. Field commands were instead under the local political province chiefs, men chosen for their personal loyalty to Diem. As a result, the regime controlled less than half of its own country. In late 1961 the Communists briefly seized control of Phuoc Vinh, near Saigon itself, staged a show trial and publicly beheaded the province chief. Diem pressed the US for a bilateral defense treaty, and again promised reform.

THE COMING OF THE AMERICANS

In December 1962 the first US combat troops arrived: Air Force advisors who actually flew combat missions, Army Special Forces, and military and civil advisors. More than the Communists, Diem feared the rise of a populist military officer and the threat of a coup, and he punished ARVN officers who achieved victories. Major operations were deliberately botched. By early 1963 things were spiraling out of control. Senior American military officers and Embassy officials were determined to put the best possible face on the news, even at the cost of passing on news they knew to be false. Exasperated junior officers were leaking contradictory information to the American press.

In May 1963 the government in Hue allowed special flags to be flown in celebration of the archbishop’s (Diem’s brother’s) birthday. Then in early June they denied a Buddhist request to fly traditional flags in celebration of Buddha’s birthday. The ensuing demonstrations cost nine lives, and spread as far as Saigon. Diem again botched the negotiations designed to halt the violence, allowing Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu (a Catholic and Diem’s sister-in-law) to taunt the Buddhists, denouncing them as Communist sympathizers. Buddhist monks, or bonze, began a traditional protest campaign, immolating themselves with gasoline in public places, and students joined in public demonstrations.

As the Buddhist protests mounted, Diem paid lip service to American demands for reform, but allowed Madame Nhu to continue to publicly taunt the Buddhists. Then he began to harass and censor the American press, who smuggled reports out by way of sympathetic American officers. On 21 August Diem’s brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, staged a massive raid on the Buddhist temples by special police and ARVN Special Forces disguised as ARVN soldiers. This led to another round of protests by students, but more importantly, it enraged any senior ARVN officers who still held on to a shred of professionalism or patriotism.

The protests escalated throughout September, and the ARVN generals put out feelers to determine how the Americans would respond to a coup. The new American Ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, advised Kennedy that Diem would never change, but General Paul Harkins, the commander of the Military Assistance Command,